32 LORD GRIMTHORPE 
so anticipated. Those discussions, however, are valuable 
to me now, because I find that the only person who disputed 
the author’s main arguments or conclusion was one who 
confessed—not at all in the offensive and insolent language 
of some atheists—that his difficulty remained, that there was 
and could be no proof of the God on whom a future life 
depends. I had already written what you will see farther 
on, on the necessary connexion between the two doctrines. 
Mr. Holyoake’s speech on that occasion still more convinces 
me that it is all but a waste of time to try to prove future 
responsibility independently of the proof of revelation, or 
what is called the Evidences of Christianity. I have not 
seen. anything else in those papers or speeches which 
suggests any material addition to or alteration of what I 
had written before. 
I have also found a paper written for the Christian 
Evidence Society in 1873 by Prebendary Row, who took 
part in those discussions here, and I am sorry to hear is very 
ill now, concluding: ‘My whole argument therefore stands 
thus: Mankind have asserted with unanimous voice that 
certain actions are virtuous and vicious. But they can be 
neither unless men are voluntary agents. All voluntary 
agency involves responsibility. Men therefore feel them- 
selves responsible.” He rightly combats the ordinary at- 
tempts of atheistic writers to make out that we are not volun- 
tary agents, which I should think never persuaded anybody 
yet that he is not a voluntary agent, except under absolute 
compulsion, or some motive which he is literally, and not 
only figuratively, unable to resist, to do something danger- 
ous to himself; in which case he is deemed, both by the law 
of England and common sense, irresponsible for his actions, 
or a lunatic. Such cases as that have nothing to do with 
the question of free will in persons possessed of proper 
reasoning’ faculties, nor have any other manifest exceptions: 
nor ought we ever to be frightened by the common claptrap 
difficulty of what is called “drawing the line” between 
normal and exceptional cases, either by abstract rules (which 
are never of any use) or in particular instances, where 
different juries might guess differently whether a man is in 
his right mind or not. 
Dr. Row also exposed the fallacy of the late Mr. Buckle’s 
paradoxical conceit, that, because all human actions which 
are reducible to statistics show approximate averages, or 
that about so many people per million generally commit 
murder or suicide or matrimony in a year at present, there- 
